Pre-seed VC. Investing with conviction in visionary, technical founders inventing the future. #ML #AI #Climate #techbio @DrewVolpe @MITMillieLiu @teddypowday
Boston, MA
Joined September 2016
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First Star Ventures retweeted
if you love the unadulterated west, come explore for geothermal with us
First Star Ventures retweeted
🔔 Just released: The October edition of the AI Engineering Trends report sheds light on the latest data and finds:
- 9.4% of PRs are opened by software factory agents at leading companies
- 3.5x growth in open weight model usage since March, 0.5% of weekly engineers
- AI spend for top users: $1,121 per month
- 15% of Cursor users using Grok 4.7 in its debut week
Dive into the data here: jellyfish.co/ai-engineering-…
First Star Ventures retweeted
"in the last 3 years... we've identified more new hidden geothermal systems than the entire industry combined had over the prior 30 years."
🌋🌋🌋⚡️⚡️⚡️
First Star Ventures retweeted
Board-certified gastroenterologist Dr. Harish Gagneja recorded two of his own colonoscopies and shared them online.
His goal is to take the embarrassment out of getting screened. A colonoscopy can find precancerous polyps before they turn into cancer, and polyps were removed during both of his.
He joins @ScottHickle on Episode 1 of our podcast, Dying of Embarrassment. They explore why embarrassment shouldn't stand in the way of screening.
Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=Bk3UZexH…
First Star Ventures retweeted
I built a location startup during the "SoLoMo" tech wave when Foursquare was viewed as the breakout success. It anchored NYC's rise as a startup ecosystem.
A decade later, it's a $0.
First Star Ventures retweeted
Join us next Thursday, May 28th
Heeding Nature's Call: Reading the Body with AI 👇 – at Cambridge, MA
✍️ Design 🏗️ Build 💥 Test 💡 Learn
These are the core engineering principles that guide the iterative design of everything spanning ballpoint pens to fighter jets. And now we can do the same for cells—completely automated—made possible by advanced robotics and AI.
As part of Boston Tech Week, @iOrganBio Founder and CEO @DanielDelubac will be contributing to a panel discussing the intersection of deep tech and biomedical progress. Joining him for the Heeding Nature's Call: Reading the Body with AI are:
@JohnCapodilupo of @ThroneScience and @WHOOP
@LoyConor of @romixbio
Moderated by @drewvolpe of @FirstStarVC, this fireside chat promises to be an engaging update on how deep tech is combining with biotechnology to transform human health. If you’re in Boston for @Techweek_ , you won’t want to miss it!
📝 Register for the event at partiful.com/e/MyfKGX0Dl8BiN…
🤖 Check out the full Boston Tech Week lineup at tech-week.com/
🌐 Learn more about iOB at iorgan.bio/
#BOSTechWeek #AI #Biotech #Organoids #NAMs
First Star Ventures retweeted
Thanks for the shout on this weekend’s @theallinpod, @Jason 🙌 🙌
Would love to hook you up with a @ThroneScience
First Star Ventures retweeted
Join us for an evening focused on the future of Agent development.
🤝 Vercel & Jellyfish engineers will walk through the architecture behind production-ready AI agents — from tool use and memory to orchestration and deployment — and introduce Eve, a new framework purpose-built for Agents.
This isn’t a sales pitch. It’s a technical evening: a live demo, a real conversation, and time to ask the questions that matter to what you’re building.
Then, time to build.
🗓️ Thursday, Oct 22
🕟 5:30-8:30pm ET
📍PillarVC, Boston
See you there? luma.com/s6k8kdkh
First Star Ventures retweeted
Pro rata rights are a free call option on future rounds. Has any startup ever priced them separately?
If a VC wants them, charge x% extra instead of bundling it in.
First Star Ventures retweeted
To scale autonomous trucking, you need reliable software AND sensible unit economics. Today, we’re excited to announce our use of @Lenovo’s L4 Autonomous Driving Domain Controller AD1 (built on @NVIDIA Hyperion) as our production compute platform for Class 8 driverless trucks.
This changes the game for driverless freight making total hardware BOM (compute + sensors) targeted at $50,000/truck 3x-8x lower than industry benchmarks.
Real scale requires production economics. Excited to build the future of freight with NVIDIA and Lenovo.
bot.auto/media/bot-auto-sele…
First Star Ventures retweeted
If you're in boston during tough tech week stop by our founder Q&A event on Wed 28th! Three founders closing the loop to turn earth obs into actual cash (historically difficult!). Come hang out and touch the frontier luma.com/3no8ptrn
First Star Ventures retweeted
I'm very excited to have finally invested in a startup using muon tomography. To me, that's preposterous. Primary cosmic rays, things of that nature
First Star Ventures retweeted
Turso 0.8 is now out! In our benchmarks, it has up to 500x lower transaction tail latency and 7x higher concurrent write throughput than SQLite. turso.tech/blog/turso-0.8.0
I'm working on Turso 0.8 release blog post. Turns out @jussisaur likes @BenjDicken's balls (the animations) so much he wanted us to try out something too.
First Star Ventures retweeted
"We’re entering the next phase of autonomous trucking: moving beyond development and into real commercial freight operations. At Bot Auto, we’re now moving 350 loads per month across Texas, putting our technology to work every day.
Every load matters. Every mile gives us another opportunity to validate the technology, improve operations, strengthen our network, and prove the economics of autonomous trucking in real-world conditions.
And this is only the beginning.
We’re building toward the Capacity Grid Powered by Bot — a scalable autonomous network designed to grow lane by lane, market by market, and ultimately support our goal of 1 billion autonomous miles annually by 2031.
Physical AI is moving from the lab to the real world.
350 loads a month today. A much bigger network ahead." - Bot Auto President & COO Brett Suma
Read more about Brett's first 100 days with us here:
bot.auto/blog/building-an-au…
First Star Ventures retweeted
Very cool to see coverage of the important, valuable work Coastal Assembly is doing. They're growing new beaches, new islands, new harbors - passively, cheaply, durably. I'm amped for this team to (literally) make their mark on the world nytimes.com/2026/09/16/clima…
First Star Ventures retweeted
This was *such* a joy to shoot with Will. I’m so excited to get to share this!!!
Thanks again for spending the day with us! 🙌 🙌
Most consumer health startups go after healthy consumers first.
@ThroneScience is starting with people who already live with gut conditions, where automatic tracking has an immediate use beyond curiosity.
I spent the day with co-founder @ScottHickle and the team to see how they’re bringing an unusual $18M-funded hardware product to market.
The route to making a smart toilet mainstream may start with the people who already need it most.
New INSIDE Startups episode out now.
First Star Ventures retweeted
Raising almost $18M to build a smart toilet took 178 rejections. 102 for the seed. 76 for the Series A.
And honestly, I get it! Most investors are allergic to hardware, healthcare, or consumer. We're all three.
Some rejections hurt more than others.
The best thing you can hear from an investor is yes.
The second best thing is a quick ‘no’.
One investor showed up to an intro call and the first thing he said was, "I would never invest in this but I just had to hear the pitch."
The worst, though, is when someone drags it out for five meetings, then says, "Unfortunately I just couldn't get the partnership there. I'll be rooting for you from the sidelines!" Boooo.
I’m glad we found amazing investors who see what we're building as important and inevitable. Their conviction has allowed us to build a product I genuinely believe will change the world.
First Star Ventures retweeted
If you’re working on strange new things in the future of health enabled by novel devices, reach out to @teddypowday
🦾💊🧬
